Apple Inc. has acquired Topsy Labs Inc., a company that specializes in Twitter search, monitoring and analytics. The deal is worth about $200 million, media sources are reporting.
For those unfamiliar with the Topsy site, it is a resource allowing users to slice and dice all tweets dating back to the very beginning in 2006.
On the site, users can sort through the estimated 500 million or so tweets made a day in a variety of ways.
Search, Analytics and Trends
Topsy’s data collection is basically divided into three categories:
Search
By searching for a particular term or group of terms you can see the number of times it has occurred on Twitter over the past hour, day, seven days, 12 days or 30 days. You can also ask Topsy the number of all time mentions for a term. Then specify whether you are looking for the term in a link, tweet, photo or video. Or ask whether it was mentioned by a user considered to be an influencer.
Analytics
By entering up to three terms (brand names would be one example) you can determine comparatively how mentions of these terms have compared over the past month. If you choose Coke, Pepsi and Starbucks, for example (pictured above), you’ll see how popular each term was with Twitter users recently.
Trends
You can also discover whether specific terms are trending with a large number of Twitter users. Simply enter your term in the social trends section. Then select the top 100, 1,000, 5,000 or 20,000 mentions. You can again select the kind of content you are seeking in tweets on the topic.
In this video overview, Topsy co-founder and chief scientist Rishab Aiyer Ghosh explains how Topsy sorts data results:
Apple’s Plans Remain Undefined
Apple has not been specific about its plans for the Topsy purchase. However, The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the sale, has speculated. The analytics company’s technology will likely be incorporated into the company’s products.
The service could be used to:
- Help Apple recommend top trending TV shows, songs and movies to iTune customers.
- Enhance the functionality of Siri, the virtual assistant built into Apple’s mobile operating system for the iPhone.
- Provide more data for companies running campaigns with iAd, which sells ads in apps run on the iPhone, iPad and iPod.
In general, Topsy could help Apple better monitor social conversations about all its products.
Bottom line: More data can benefit any company big or small, and analytics tools like Topsy can help companies make sense of conversations already going on in social media.
Image: Topsy
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